Grotto is a collaborative visualization research and film project commissioned and developed for the CityX group exhibition of the Italian Virtual Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021.
Bound up in cultural, social, and political conditions, the grotto functions much like the theater, as a metaphorical setting of the human-nature drama, whether in the form of primitive habitation or an immersive (yet controlled) experience of ‘the elements’. Its unique hybridity slips strangely between architectural elements and the atmospheres of nature. As artificial as they were, historical grottoes still deferred to the natural world, relying on local sources of water, stone, and coral, and then proceeded to control them resolutely.
How might the re-representation of grottoes, utilizing 3D point clouds as a form of immersive terrain modeling, shift our understanding of the relationship between architecture and landscape, artificial and natural?
The first site of investigation is a dark portal of schist dynamited in the 19th century, a major transfiguration after a gentle sedimentary origin. The second appears as a metaphor of the human-nature drama, the deep delved earth joining with a sheer mountain to produce an accidental enclosure. Terrain modeling produces a second metamorphosis for each, transforming geologic mass into weightless data through point cloud representation, a naked display of our epoch’s geologic frailty.
In the larger sense, Grotto seeks to investigate the new milieu of a
post-humanist reality, one which finds the human decentered relative to planetary forces, and characterized by the ever more catastrophic effects of climate change.
Project Credits
Art Direction: Cathryn Dwyre & Chris Perry
Project Associate: Crystal Griggs
Special Thanks: Ed Keller & Evan Douglis
Grotto film link: https://youtu.be/4qVM5LIqVB4
CityX Italian Virtual Pavilion exhibition links:
Gallery #10 (Cathryn Dwyre profile): https://cityxvenice.org/10
Gallery #12 (Chris Perry profile): https://cityxvenice.org/12